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An Abandoned Landscape

by Matthew Atkins

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about

It's always a pleasure to have something from Matthew land in my pile and this week it is a double whammy with the seventeenth and eighteenth releases on his own Minimal Resource Manipulation label. I'm struggling to decipher what the sound sources are that create 'Roadside Picnic'. Has he stuck a contact mic in his mates gob while he munches on a brie and grape sandwich? Regardless it's a lovely soundworld to be immersed in with slowly mutating ambient synth work hovering over the heavily processed field recordings/computer manipulations. Trace Elements has a lovely hushed spraying sound that you get as a child when you smash a can of Coke against a rock and listen to the liquid slowly gently evacuating. Then we get some layers of pouring , dripping and bubbling water sounds. 'The Voices of Ghosts' has spooked and distant voices mutate into whispered howls, sheets of tone, static, crackle and other strange sounds. 'Absence' as the title suggests is a minimal, hushed track that demands close listening which will reveal detail as microscopic sounds move around an almost silent space.'Only Sadness Remains' is a super dramatic closer, with epic and sweeping melancholic electronics. A fantastic closer to yet another fine release from this totally underrated producer.
(Norman Records)

The man behind Minimal Resource Manipulation, Matthew Atkins, is also the man to fill pretty much every release in his catalogue, now up to release number 17 and 18. Now you could all too easily think that it would be a lot of the same thing, but surprisingly this ain't so. As Platform he explores the more rhythmic end of music, but under his own name he creates more an ambient kind of music. This new release under his own name is a follow-up to 'Hiatus' (see Vital Weekly 738). It uses a lot of field recordings from around London, hardly an abandoned landscape I would think, but those field recordings are starters for more extended pieces of 'empty' music, with lots sustaining synthesizer like sounds in the first piece 'Roadside Picnic' or in 'The Voice Of Ghosts', evoking indeed a sense of abandoned landscapes. Field recordings flicker away into an endless sustaining delay (which someone once described 'are we listening to the sea again?'), but here it is used effectively. 'Absence' seems almost absent of any soundmaterial, while 'Only Sadness Remains' has a deep melancholic feel to it - just as the title promises. Five highly varied pieces of music making one very excellent album.
(Vital weekly)

This sophomore record from Smallgang and Crumbling Ghost drummer Matthew Atkins is a sparse, haunting collage of atmospherics and natural sounding instrumentation. Roadside Picnic begins with the clamour of people before settling into a sorrowful ambient cooing accompanied by a circling potter’s wheel like noise and the shuffling feel of movement all around that. It feels like being inside the head of someone at once stuck within and yet utterly detached from the urban environment all around them, the cityscape occasionally managing to penetrate their bubble.

Trace Elements is a quiet field recording, what sounds like rainwater trickling down a gutter, the rainfall getting gradually heavier, it’s oddly comforting and cosy. The Voices of Ghosts is less welcoming, slip sliding sounds echo like a doctor’s scales, whilst heightened chatter bubbles away in the distance like an argument rising outside your window, and the ominous tone that creeps in like radio static and the spooky sound of voices through tunnels lends a further David Lynch-like atmosphere of unease, like walking through a dimly lit multi-storey car park with no discernible exit.

For a while Absence almost seems to live up to its title, speakers need a hasty adjustment to pick up the muffled, crunchy murmur and insectoid shuffling. Other curious sounds timidly poke their heads out now and then, some sound like stuttering liquid travelling backwards and at one point a text message is received quietly in the background. Final track Only Sadness Remains jolts you out of the eerie quiet, into a different kind of eerie, synths looming over you like dark zeppelins, it has a slow steady pace like a gigantic pair of lungs drawing deep breaths and a Vangelis-like angelic synth caught up in the middle of dense, murky surroundings.

At times this record is like a big blanket that you wrap yourself in, at others it’s disquieting and suffocating, but in that good way, like the aforementioned David Lynch, the sort of uncomfortable you’re almost willing to ‘endure’. Like the best minimal recordings it’s extremely evocative both in its subtle and more vividly realised moments.

God Is In The TV Zine (s.tt/13uxZ)

credits

released September 1, 2011

Matthew Atkins - Field Recordings and processing
MRMCDR18

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Minimal Resource Manipulation London, UK

MRM is not currently accepting demos.

MRM is a DIY label for experimental music curated by Matt Atkins, a London based sound and visual artist whose principle interests are reductionism, chance, repetition and texture. He uses objects, percussion instruments, occasionally a laptop and cassette recorders to create sound collages in both the recorded medium and live. ... more

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